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Some of you may be interested in the following
posting I made to the Ottawa Dissenters group this morning.
Ed
I've worked on Native issues for years, including
claims to land. It's a complicated mess. Promises made a long time
ago were either not kept or severely eroded. For example, when
Saskatchewan and Alberta became provinces in 1905, the provisions of treaties
signed before then had mostly not been met. The deal made by the federal
government was that the provinces should go about setting aside the lands
involved. Did they do it? Why of course not. So you now have
Native people potentially owning large chunks of both provinces, chunks on which
non-Native activities have become firmly established, without any
possibility of actually owning them. The provinces claim that they can't
do anything about it because, despite their 1905 undertaking, Native issues
are not their responsibility. So back to the feds.
With a few exceptions, claims in northern Canada
have been settled quite successfully. During the 1960s and 1970s, Native
people woke up and began to recognize how absolutely screwed they had
been. Law suites were launched against hydro development in northern
Quebec and these had to be settled, including setting aside lands, before
dams and diversions could be built. The Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry
of the 1970s provided a huge platform for the airing of claims issues in the
western Arctic, and settlements favourable to Native people
resulted.
Nevertheless, as the recent rhubarb in Caledonia
illustrates, things continue to be a mess, probably irresolvable in many
cases. Perhaps, like the Americans, we should have conquered our Native
people and converted them to "internal dependent nations" or whatever they call
them. But we don't do things like that. We're Canadians,
eh.
Ed
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